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In our sinful human nature we’re all hypocrites—quick to see the masks on everyone else, almost never on ourselves. Jesus meets that very tendency in Matthew 7:12 with a rule most people already know by heart: whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them.
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
The pastor contrasts the negative Golden Rule (“don’t do to others what you don’t want done to yourself”) with Jesus’s positive version (“do to others what you want done to you”). What are some practical examples from your own life where this distinction matters—where avoiding harm isn’t enough, but active good is needed?
The sermon uses the F-35 jet and the bee examples to illustrate that merely avoiding evil isn’t the Christian standard. In what ways might we be like “yellow jackets” in our daily interactions—restraining from harm but failing to actively build up those around us—and what practical steps could help us become more like the “carpenter bees”?
Reflecting on the sheep and goats parable in Matthew 25, why do you think Jesus emphasizes sins of omission (failing to feed, clothe, or visit) as the basis for judgment rather than active evils, and how should that reshape our understanding of loving our neighbor?
The sermon highlights how easily we spot hypocrisy in others—like celebrities flying private jets for climate causes—but miss it in ourselves. Where have you noticed this pattern in your own life, particularly regarding the call to treat others as you wish to be treated?
Jesus links the Golden Rule to the summary of the Law and Prophets: loving God and loving neighbor. What would it look like in your current relationships or community to shift from “at least I’m not hurting them” to actively doing what you would want done for you?
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
So today we’re going to continue looking at the next verse. We’re just looking at one verse today, and it’s a verse that I don’t even need to read. We will in a moment, but I don’t even need to read because it’s a verse that probably most people, even if they’ve never been to church, even if they don’t know who said it, they know the words of it. We’re looking at the Golden Rule tonight.
Because we do, when we think about the Golden Rule and the call that our Lord has as we seek to rightly treat those around us, is that it really boils down to the problem that, in our sinful human nature, we’re all hypocrites. Now that’s a churchy word, but the word actually comes from Greek theater. It’s referring to actors.
And in the Greek theater, the actors, you might only have a few. They didn’t have giant casts of people in elaborate costumes and so on. They would have masks, and you might have two or three people playing all the people in the play. They’d put the different masks on to represent who it was that they were at that moment. And so you’d realize that the person behind the mask was not really any of them. It broke down that level of illusion.
And it’s thought, some have commented, perhaps even in Jesus’ childhood, that Mary and his stepfather Joseph took him to see a Greek play. We don’t know that, but it’s interesting to think about because it was only a few miles away from where he grew up that you could go to Greek theater. And so it was quite possible that he did see it.
And Jesus is the one that uses hypocrite in this negative sense that we think about it. He introduces that phrase that now exists in our language, and in many languages. And if you think about it, what Jesus was basically saying when he called people hypocrites was that you’re not really sincere, you’re not really who you are behind the mask. You put on one mask at one moment, you put on a different mask at another moment, but you’re not real.
That’s where he’s challenging us throughout the Sermon on the Mount, and he challenges the religious leaders over and over again during his earthly ministry. And it’s something that we don’t like to see in ourselves. In fact, most of the time we probably don’t see in ourselves, but we see very clearly in other people around us.
Isn’t it amazing when you think about how everyone around us seems to be hypocritical on something? It’s not so hard not to be hypocritical. Why is everyone else a hypocrite? It’s because it never seems hypocritical when it’s us doing it, right?
And as I was thinking about the Golden Rule and this call to be sincerely who it is that God has made us to be, to flee hypocrisy, I found myself thinking about something that makes headlines every so often. Some celebrity. These days it seems like celebrities oftentimes champion green causes, right?
We need to save the planet, we need to avoid climate change. And so, inevitably, once someone becomes really famous, they pick up a cause like that. Many of them pick up that particular cause. And then the headlines come because what do they do? They get in their private jet to fly around and talk about how we need to waste less energy.
And so, for example, a few weeks ago I saw a headline about Leonardo DiCaprio, and he has flown thousands of miles in his private jet for the sake of speaking about green causes. A couple years ago he was going to go accept an award, and he had an opportunity to give a speech across the Atlantic Ocean about the environment, so he hopped in his plane, flew across the Atlantic Ocean, gave the speech, and flew back.
Now is he unusual? No. There are lots of people that have that sort of means that do the exact same thing and speak in the same way. And while I don’t think anyone here has a private jet that you have at your disposal, if you do, let me know. It would be fun to go up in it with you. But if you don’t, it wouldn’t be fun? Oh, well.
Clearly he speaks from experience. I’m going to be talking to Hayden afterwards and find out about his private jet. But most of us don’t have that, and so it’s really easy. We have these headlines. Oh, look at Leonardo DiCaprio. Look at this person. Look at that person who has all this wealth and goes and gives these speeches about how we need to waste less energy and we need to save the planet, and then they go and burn thousands of gallons of jet fuel doing so. How hypocritical.
But the truth is that all of us do that at some level. We may not have a private jet, but we hop in the jets of our own personal hobby horses. I just mixed metaphors there, but bear with me. We hop in the jets of our hobby horses. And as we do, we’re sailing around, we’re flying around, we’re galloping around, declaring these things that we say need to be followed and need to be held to, even as we violate the very things that we say.
We can see the hypocrisy in others but not in ourselves, and Jesus is going to challenge us in Matthew chapter 7 verse 12 to think further about that. So let’s go ahead and open in prayer, and then we’ll dig further into that.
Let’s pray.
Father, thank you for your word, for the truth that we find in it, for the fact that you are knowable in it, that even though we often put on different masks and we present ourselves in different ways, and we often declare things with high moral authority and then actually go and immediately violate the very things that we declare, that you don’t. You say what is true, and you are true. You say that you love and you do love. You say you are with us and you are. And Lord, we pray that you’d be with us now as we study your word, that by the power of your Holy Spirit, you might apply it to our hearts, we ask in Jesus’ name, amen.
Let’s take a look at this very familiar, familiar verse. “And whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them. For this is the law and the prophets.” That’s simple, right? No big deal? Everyone on board? Anyone say, “That’s stupid. We shouldn’t do to others what we want them to do to us.” No, no, no, we shouldn’t do that. Anyone? No, of course not, right? Conceptually we find it very agreeable.
Now, I mentioned that the Golden Rule, in its form that Jesus states, is unique to him, just like his phrases about hypocrisy are unique to him. But the Golden Rule itself is not unique to Jesus in its negative form. And this is the interesting thing. Jesus says, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” But before Jesus’ time, there were people who would say the negative version of the same thing. Don’t do to others what you don’t want done to yourself. Sort of similar. Very similar.
In fact, at first blush, it might even seem like it basically has the same impact, right? Because both are saying, think about what it is that you, how you feel, how you want people to be around you, and then do the same. And so, for example, in Jewish wisdom, there had been this negative Golden Rule for centuries before Jesus’ time. And you find it elsewhere in the world as well.
But we do see this rabbinical tradition developing around this. And in itself, in itself, this is an amazing command if you think about it. How much better off would this world be if we simply all abided by the rule not to do to others what we don’t want them to do to us? If I never did to any of you the sorts of things that I’m hoping you won’t do to me, we’d be better off. If all of us could do that, if just here at Little Hills Church, all of us, all the time, could avoid ever doing things to others that we don’t want done to us, we would be showing more of God’s light. We’d be showing more of his love to the world.
So this is an amazing thing in and of itself. For example, we see in the second century BC piece of Jewish literature, Tobit, this little story, Tobit 4:14: “Do not keep over until the next day the wages of those who work for you, but pay them at once. If you serve God, you will receive payment. Watch yourself, my son, in everything you do and discipline yourself in your conduct. What you hate, do not do to anyone. Do not drink wine to excess or let drunkenness go with you on your way.”
Now, we Protestants don’t read Tobit typically. It’s not in our Protestant Bibles. It’s not in the Jewish Bible either, but it is in the Catholic Bible. So if you’re from a Catholic background, it might sound somewhat familiar. But Tobit originates in the second century BC, like I mentioned, so about 200 years before Jesus. And it tells the story of a man named Tobit, who in this chapter is giving instruction to his son, Tobias, before he heads off and before Tobit dies. And he wants him to keep in mind this command in the frame of pleasing God, not to do to others what he would hate having done to himself.
And we see an example of that there. Don’t hold back wages to other people. Because why? Well, you’d hate if people held back wages to you. If you’ve ever worked someplace and the employer was finding ways to avoid paying you, you hated that. So why is it so hard, then, that if we suddenly are the person who is paying the wages, to remember that when suddenly maybe things are a little tight and we think, well, you know, if I can just stall paying my employees a little bit, right?
Because too often, here’s the thing, I’ve not ever been in that position, but I do know people, Christians, who have not come through in paying their employees. I’ve known Christians that I’ve worked for who have found ways to get out of paying me. And you think about that and you think, well, but you wouldn’t want that done to you. Why is it that it’s so much harder when we have the opportunity to do it to someone else?
Rabbi Hillel said this, reflecting on this narrow version of the Golden Rule, he said, this is the whole law. All the rest is commentary. Go and learn it. Well, again, if we could just do this, we would be coming a long, we’d be going a very long way. And if you think about the time when Jesus is teaching, they’ve heard from Rabbi Hillel. They know the story of Tobit. They know these sorts of things. They’ve heard this.
And so when Jesus gives the Golden Rule, they, the reason he’s stating it is because it’s not something that people naturally are able to do easily. And he’s reminding them of what they need to do. They already know the basic concept, yet it’s just so hard to actually do.
What did I do wrong to others? I just mentioned that one example that’s used in Tobit. There are a few others in that book. But there are lots of things that we do, and we don’t even think about them. How easy is it, for example, that you’re on the clock wherever you work, and you go on social media because you’re just bored and you need to zone out for a little bit? If you’re really pressed, you know that’s wrong, and yet it doesn’t hurt.
You have someone, say you have a plumber come and work, you call it because your sink is overflowing, and you have a plumber come out to your house. And the plumber goes in there and says, yeah, it’s $80 an hour or $100 an hour. And you walk in, and the sink’s still overflowing, and he’s posting a picture on Facebook. How would you feel? You’d feel horrible, right? That’d be bad. And yet we do it.
And oftentimes we do it because we find a way to justify it in the moment. We find a way to say, well, what I’m doing isn’t really that bad because I’m still going to get my work done. It’s not so bad for me because it’s a huge organization. I’m just an individual paying a plumber.
When we think about God’s call into our lives, he calls us to a just way of life, a way that we don’t find excuses for why our situation is different. We don’t want to be lied to, and yet we lie. We don’t want someone to ignore us, and yet we ignore others.
So many times that we think that we’re doing pretty good, and yet we put this filter on, and this filter’s covering up how we’re falling short. All these things that would just drive us crazy if someone else did it to us. We want to be forgiven, but we don’t forgive. We want patience with us, but we’re not patient with others. We want people to give us as much understanding as possible, to assume the best in us, and yet we don’t assume the best in others.
We do these things over and over again. We fall into it over and over again. So here’s the thing, just stating the Golden Rule as it already existed at the time that Jesus is preaching the Sermon on the Mount, this is incredibly, incredibly hard to do.
But here’s the thing with the Golden Rule as it existed before Jesus’ time, and this is where I think the rabbi, as good a point as he was making to say that this summed up the Law and the Prophets, was missing something. If you think about saying, don’t do to others what you’d hate having done to yourself, well, there are lots of things that we hope people will do, that to love one another we need to do, that go beyond not just avoiding doing bad things to others.
I was reading last week as I was thinking about the difference here, because the wording is different, and I was reading the story about a lost F-35 jet. Did anyone hear about this? This is kind of, this is mind-boggling to me. I left town on Monday morning, this had happened over the weekend, and so it was like a day and a half into the military’s highest technologically advanced jet, the pilot had to eject out of it, a day and a half into searching for it, they couldn’t find it.
Take a look at this thing. This is an impressive jet. It’s years of the best military minds dreaming of what we needed to do anything, and so the Army and the Navy and the Marines all use variants of this jet. The Marine version even can lift up vertically, it doesn’t have to go down a runway to take off.
This is an incredible jet, an incredible jet that malfunctioned last week, and so the pilot had to eject from it while he was in training in the United States, it wasn’t in some foreign country, it wasn’t shot at, something went wrong with the jet.
So here it was, this jet that cost close to $100 million to build, that requires a $400,000 helmet on the pilot, this incredibly advanced, sophisticated jet that can fly into enemy territory, communicate with other F-35s so they can scope out the ground and coordinate attacks and do all this, malfunctioned, the pilot had to eject from it, and then the jet disappeared.
Now did the jet follow the negative golden rule? Well in a sense we could say yes, it didn’t kill the pilot. And if planes had feelings, I’m sure the plane wouldn’t want someone to kill it, and it didn’t kill the pilot. So we could say, don’t do the things that you’d hate having done to others, well the jet did not kill the pilot, the pilot was able to safely eject, and then have this surreal conversation with 911 where he called as he landed on the ground and said, ma’am, a military jet crashed, I’m the pilot, we need to get rescue rolling. I’m not sure where the airplane is, it would have crash landed somewhere, I ejected.
And I have to imagine that was probably the most bizarre 911 dispatch call that dispatcher had had in a very long time, but that was the call.
Now see, the problem with this jet is, well it’s problem and it’s benefit, is this jet is a stealth jet, it’s meant to be hard to find. Now you would think our own military would know how to track it anyway, but apparently they don’t, and so it took them almost two days to locate the crash site of this $100 million jet. They still don’t know why it crashed, or at least they’re not willing to say.
It avoided killing the pilot, but you can see so much wrong there, they can’t track the thing, it didn’t stay up in the air, I mean you don’t even want the pilot to eject, yes it avoided doing the evil of killing the pilot, but there was still so much wrong. We don’t want a jet that just avoids killing the pilot, we want a jet that stays up in the air.
We want a jet that’s going to fly on a flight someday, whether it’s a private jet or a commercial jet or whatever the case, maybe Hayden can arrange for you to fly in his, but whatever the case, we want more than to not die when we go on the jet.
We want the jet to land. We want it to get us to wherever we were trying to go. We don’t want to be lost in the woods, knowing the jet’s still up in the air until it runs out of fuel and crashes somewhere.
And this is the key difference that Jesus brings us to as he reformulates the golden rule. Because Jesus says it’s not enough to avoid killing the pilot. It’s not enough to just avoid doing overt evil to other people. It’s not enough not to kill somebody else, it’s not enough not to punch someone else, it’s not enough to actively avoid lying to someone else. We need to do more.
You see, Jesus doesn’t want us to just worry about not doing active sinful things. He wants us also to be aware that God calls us to do things that we often just simply ignore doing.
Because so often when we, our first inclination is to be angry at someone, to be unkind to someone, to maybe even be outright cruel to someone, it’s say, okay, going to pray, God, help me not to get angry at this person, help me not to just blow my top, help me not to do this clearly wrong thing.
And we focus on maybe a little scripture and we think about it and we back off a little and we think, okay, I didn’t kill anyone today, I didn’t yell at anyone today, ah, I can see the halo glowing over my head.
And Jesus says, no, that’s not enough. Did you love that person that your knee-jerk sinful reaction caused you to want to hate? Did you show patience to that person that you were about to blow your top off at?
When you’re at work, did you not only avoid logging into Facebook or TikTok, but did you also work extra hard like you’d want someone to work for you? When you were at school, did you not only not cheat off the student next to you, but did you do all the work to study and prepare so that the teacher knew that you were actually taking seriously what was being taught?
Because you see, we can go part way and we meet with what the teachers of the world have said time and again as a good moral standard, don’t do evil stuff.
You don’t need Jesus to know that’s where we should be. Lots of people have said that. People in other religions have said that. But Jesus says, it’s not enough just to avoid doing evil stuff. You need to be like your heavenly Father, and to be like your heavenly Father is to actually do the loving things that He does.
Matthew 25, verse 31. Jesus says, “When the Son of Man comes in His glory and all the angels with Him, then He will sit on His glorious throne. Before Him will be gathered all the nations, and He will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. And He will place the sheep on His right, but the goats on His left.
“Then the King will say to those on His right, ‘Come, you are blessed by my Father. Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food. I was thirsty and you gave me drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me. I was naked and you clothed me. I was sick and you visited me. I was in prison and you came to me.’
“And the righteous will answer Him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you or thirsty and give you drink? And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’
“And the King will answer them, ‘Truly I say to you as you did it to one of the least of these, my brothers, you did it to me.’
“Then He will say to those on His left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me no food. I was thirsty and you gave me no drink. I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’
“And they will also answer, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison and did not minister to you?’
“And He will say to them, He will answer them, saying, ‘Truly I say to you as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’
“And these will go away into eternal punishment for the righteous into eternal life.”
What truly summarizes the prophets, it’s not merely avoiding being actively evil. Because if you think about what Jesus says there in that parable, the people that are separated on the left, the people who are rejected, what does He say about them? He doesn’t say, you went and you whipped me. You went and you stole from me. You went and you spit in my face. No, He doesn’t say that.
He says, you didn’t feed me and clothe me. You didn’t visit me in prison. Not that you got me thrown in prison unjustly, you didn’t visit me in prison. Not that you stole my clothes, but you saw that I had need and you didn’t go and give.
See, God demands more than what our morality wants to give.
Proverbs 14, 21: “Whoever despises his neighbor is a sinner, but blessed is he who is generous to the poor.”
If you really want to summarize the law and the prophets, if you really want to know what it is that God is about, He’s about so much more than simply restraining doing evil.
We can sometimes muster the strength to restrain doing active evil, but as Jesus preaches here, He wants us to understand exactly what the standard of holiness is—not because He’s unrealistic and thinks that we can actually do it. He knows that we’re going to fail. He talks about how we’re going to fail.
What does He do? He calls us to trust in Him, but He wants us, as we do that, not to be hypocritical, to understand where we fall short, to be open about where we fall short, to seek His strength. Not just, “Lord, help me not to get so angry at this person. Help me not to be so lazy as I’m working on this assignment that I don’t want to do.” But, “Lord, help me to do the very best. Help me to do what would be not just somehow less than utterly terrible to the other person, but it’s actually a blessing to them.”
Jesus summarizes the Law and the Prophets, Matthew 22:37-40, and He said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depends all the Law and the Prophets.”
You know, here’s the thing. I don’t want this clicker to merely avoid electrocuting me, right? I want it to advance the slides. I want it to follow the golden rule for technology, to work unto others as you would want them to work unto you or something like that.
But, you know, I think when we think about it, when we think about the difference here, it really helps us to understand just what a calling it is that Jesus has for us. Because it’s a very, very steep calling. And when he says to love the Lord our God and to love our neighbor, and so these things summarize all the Law and the Prophets.
You think about everything that Jesus teaches, everything we read about in the Old Testament, everything in the New Testament. Here is the heart of it, friends. And when we think about it, what does it mean to love our neighbor as ourselves? It means to follow the golden rule. It means not just the golden rule that existed before—that’s like a 10-carat rule—but the 24-carat golden rule. The one that actually says to love other people.
The one that says it’s not enough simply to restrain from evil. It calls us to do good, not to miss opportunities to do it.
This week, as some of you know, I was out of town. The goal was to kind of just de-stress a little bit and enjoy some time in nature. And I love nature. I love taking pictures of nature. I’d like to introduce you to some friends of mine.
Here’s a little honeybee I took a few months ago just on a flower. And I love watching bees. And for the most part, you know, they’re really pretty agreeable creatures. I’ve gotten really close to them taking pictures. This one was just happy. As long as I let this little bee enjoy the flowers, no problem.
Here’s another honeybee. I mean, it’s just amazing when you think of God’s creation and the beauty of it.
Now, I’m particularly fond of carpenter bees. I know some people really don’t like them, that they’re pests, but I found them incredibly neat little creatures to get to know. And I know they look fierce, but you know, carpenter bees, if you actually get to know them, they don’t like to sting people. They very rarely ever sting people. They just buzz around.
And I learned this over the past few years, especially. They’d be out pollinating my plants, and one of them would frequently just come over and buzz over and just come over and look at me and buzz around a little bit and then buzz back to one of the flowers. Just say hi.
And every time I go out, the same little bee comes over. She had a unique spotted pattern. I knew it was the same bee. And so I have a really pretty good rapport with bees. I don’t have a good rapport with yellow jackets, though.
And so I was in the woods this week. I wasn’t even trying to take pictures of bees or anything like that. I was walking across a paved parking lot, and all of a sudden, I feel this thing grab onto my face out of the blue.
And I thought, I’d seen some grasshoppers around. I thought maybe one of them had bounced into my face or something. But then I felt the pain. And this yellow jacket stung me not once but twice on my lips.
I don’t know why. I was in the middle of asphalt. I wasn’t walking across the yellow jacket nest or anything.
But then the bee, well, it’s not technically a bee. The wasp stared me down and probably was admiring the handiwork of the stinger because of my lips. I got free Botox treatment this week from this bee or this yellow jacket. My lips were all swollen. My gums were swollen. It was just miserable.
And it struck me as I thought about it. I guess I’ve been stung twice by yellow jackets over the years, and maybe once other from a bee when I was walking across the yard, but not often. But I thought about that yellow jacket in contrast to the carpenter bees I was just telling you about.
And if you think about the difference, it’s really notable. And it really struck me how it presented the golden rule in a sense because you see, the thing is, even if I can avoid being around yellow jackets, you don’t get one that’s particularly aggressive that just decides to land on my face in the middle of a parking lot.
I don’t know anyone that really likes yellow jackets. Why? Because they’re aggressive. They don’t want you around. And if you get around them, they will sting you. They are not nice creatures.
And yet I was talking glowingly about that carpenter bee. Why? Because the carpenter bee pollinates my plants and then just buzzes by in a very friendly fashion. I’ve been around tons of them and never been stung by one.
What’s the difference? On the one hand, you have a yellow jacket that most of the time obeys the negative golden rule. It’s not out there actively stinging me every day. I mean, there are lots of yellow jackets out this time of the year.
And I can say 99.999% of probably all the yellow jackets I’ve been around have not stung me. But I can’t tell you of a single time I’ve actually enjoyed being around a yellow jacket. And the times where it has chosen to sting me have certainly emphasized that.
I can tell you every summer times I enjoy being around other sorts of bees and photographing them because they’re beautiful, fascinating creatures. And they also tend my garden for me. I get wonderful peppers and stuff thanks to them. They’re doing something active and good.
Here’s the question, friends. Are we yellow jackets or are we carpenter bees? Because too often Christians are saying, I’m succeeding because I’m a yellow jacket that’s not stinging anybody. Yes, I’m angry. Yes, I’d like to sting people. Yes, I post things that almost should be stinging people online and find ways to say it sort of without saying it. But I’m not actively stinging anyone. I’m obeying the golden rule.
And when we think about how Jesus very intentionally modifies the rule that people already knew, he was making a point. It wasn’t just that Jesus said this and he kind of basically meant don’t do evil stuff. Jesus knew well that they knew the negative form of the golden rule.
He changes it because he wants us to understand we need to be the beautiful honeybees and carpenter bees and bumblebees that are tending the garden, that are actually helping those around us, not the yellow jackets attacking people and sometimes restraining our anger.
So where am I failing to love God? Where am I failing to love my neighbor? Not just because I’m doing active evil because we try to deal with that, but I’m not doing active good.
Where am I doing less than I know I would want someone to do for me? I see someone hurting and I don’t go over and try to make them feel worse, but I just don’t go over there at all. I think I don’t want to waste the time.
Where do I see someone who’s struggling and I don’t try to help them find a way to make things work?
Where do I know that I could take five minutes and say a kind word to someone and I don’t because I just don’t want to?
And imagine if God felt the same way. Imagine if God took a step back from us and he said, okay, I’m not going to bring my wrath down upon you. I’m just going to ignore you.
Imagine if God just decided to maintain that sort of posture towards us. And so for all eternity, maybe we read about being cast into the fires. Maybe there aren’t any fires, but there’s just the darkness of being completely out of God’s light.
Imagine a moment, a world like that.
We’re not acting like Jesus when we only restrain from evil. We act like Jesus when we actively show love.
God called us not just to be non-spreaders of evil. God called us to be spreaders of good, like him, to be like him, to show his light and his love, to call people to his kingdom, to want to see people built up and not torn down, to simply proclaim what is true in the same kind of way that Jesus did.
Jesus calls us to be spreaders of good and may we be that this day and every day.
Would you pray with me, please?
Father, we ask for your help because this is a tall, tall order. Sometimes it seems like it’s almost impossible just to avoid doing act of evil, but a lot of times we think we kind of have that under control.
And many times we are at least avoiding violating the really big act of stuff and we start to pat ourselves on the back and we start to wonder why other people don’t have everything in order.
You remind us here that we don’t either because we look at even the past day, even the past hours, even the past minutes, and where have we failed? Where have we failed to do good? Where have we maybe not torn someone down, but we haven’t built them up? Where have we not shown hate, but we haven’t shown love?
Lord, would you help us to see these places? And then would you give us the strength that we would show your love, the very love that we need and everyone around us needs as well.
We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
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